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Not far away was the mausoleum of the last king of the Society Islands, Pomaré the Fifth, with whose wide-awake widow, the queen, I had smoked a cigarette a day ago. It was a pyramid of coral, a red funeral-urn on top, and a red P on the façade. Pillars and roof were of the same color, and a chain surrounded it.

Wandering along a waste Where once a city stood, I saw a ruined tomb, And in that tomb an urn, A sacred funeral-urn, Without a name or date, And in its hollow depths A little human dust! Whose dust is this, I asked, In this forgotten urn? And where this waste now lies What city rose of old? None knows; its name is lost; It was, and is no more: Gone like a wind that blew A thousand years ago!

Weary with disappointment, disheartened in his honorable longing for just appreciation, vexed with the caprice and suspicions of his elder brother; oppressed by the ever-present tyranny of the thought so hard for such a man to bear that the woman he loved best in the land he was inexorably forbidden to marry, because, being a princess of the first rank, she might be offered and accepted to grace the harem of his brother; a mere prisoner of state, watched by the baleful eye of jealousy, and traduced by the venal tongues of courtiers; dwelling in a torment of uncertainty as to the fate to which his brother's explosive temper and irresponsible power might devote him, hoping for no repose or safety but in his funeral-urn, he began to grow hard and defiant, and that which, in the native freedom of his soul, should have been his noble steadfastness degenerated into ignoble obstinacy.